Your work at [large AI safety ecosystem org] is not replaceable

Published on October 15, 2026 5:48 PM GMT When speaking to candidates who are considering working with us at 80,000 Hours, I often hear people worry about replaceability. The familiar version of the worry is about whether the organisation will hire someone else in your place. If it will, then the difference you make by taking the job is only the difference between you and them. There are a couple of well-known answers to that. The person hired in your place probably cares about the world too, and would go on to do something useful with their time instead (Ben Todd wrote about this in 2015). And in a hiring round, the top candidate is often a lot stronger than the next-best one (Rob Wiblin worked this through in 2019). These days, I think it’s very common for organisations to do bar hiring rather than slot hiring: if we don’t hire you, we won’t hire anyone else. If someone was considering joining as a podcast host or a writer, that would resolve the replaceability question: it’s clear that their addition to 80k is approximately equal to their podcast episodes or the pieces they write. But for people in managerial or generalist roles, we often hear a different response to the replaceability worry, which goes something like this: “80k is already doing pretty well. It’s big, stable, and it has a few committed senior people. If 80k doesn’t hire me, the staff who are already there will keep looking after whatever I would have done. That means I won’t have much impact there and I shouldn’t work there.” I claim that this line of thinking is mistaken, because it doesn’t reason past the first-order counterfactual. Of course, it’s literally true that a given responsibility could otherwise be done by someone else. For example, you could join our People Operations team and run our September payroll. If you didn’t do it, then our Head of People Operations would run payroll. If she couldn’t do it then our Director of Operations would do it (or ask someone on her team to do it). And if she couldn’t do it then our Chief of Staff would do it (or ask someone else to do it). It’s very unlikely that we don’t do our September payroll, so the first-order analysis shows that it’s entirely replaceable work. Thinking through the second-order analysis (but skipping the third)[1], you’ll notice that our Head of People Operations might otherwise have done a deep dive into a tension in a management relationship and substantively improved how the two of them communicate, our Director of Operations might have reviewed the case for a solo Bay Area office and changed her mind on two aspects of it, and our Chief of Staff might otherwise have taken two meetings with speculative candidates to start new programmes. Somewhere at the bottom of that chain is a piece of work which doesn’t get done: the deep dive, the office review, or the meetings with would-be programme founders. It isn’t trivial to know what 80k will get done because someone is now running our payroll. But it is trivial to reason that something extra will be done. Similarly, if you accept an offer to join, it isn’t trivial for us to reason through what extra will be done because you came. But it is trivial to notice that, in expectation, we’ll be able to achieve more if we’re 56 people than if we’re 55.[2] This means that if you are working at 80k, or in fact at any large organisation in the AI safety ecosystem[3], you’re really likely to be making a contribution which wouldn’t happen without you. These might seem like straightforward points. And they’ve been made before and more rigorously than I’m making them here. But I do still run into the concern that working at a given organisation or in the field generally is replaceable. So I’ve decided to emphasise what I’m saying here by whining about what it feels like to me when someone tells me that they don’t want to work at 80k because we don’t need them. What follows is a description of the bottom of this chain at 80k: the things we think are worth doing, and aren’t doing. Rant We’ve been working on helping talented people tackle the world’s most pressing problems for 15 years, but the pressing problems still seem erm… Pretty bloody talent constrained. Like, we are really really trying, and maybe we look like we’ve got our shit together, but in comparison to what our mission and the world are demanding from us, we just suck at what we do. And so we need your help. I think that most of our existing programmes are markedly below the scale and impact which they could be operating at. I think our research and movement building strategy is further from the bleeding edge than it used to be. I think that we’ve probably lost ground relative to other efforts aimed at getting people into the field in the past couple of years, such that if we repeated the cross-sectional surveys we’d look worse than we previously did. We totally missed the boat on fellowships. These turned into the ~best scaling movement building innovation of the past 5